Closing Time

34 Finale

When he heard the alarm go off and saw the colored lamps on the mechanism blinking, the President was pleased with himself for having set something in motion and sat back beaming with self-satisfaction until it dawned on him that he did not know how to stop what he had started. He pressed one button after another to no avail. As he was about to call for help, help came crashing in: Noodles Cook, the stout man from the State Department whose name never came readily to mind, his slim aide from the National Security Council, Skinny, and that general from the air force newly promoted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"What happened?" screamed General Bingam, with a horror-stricken countenance inflamed with confusion.

"It works," said the President, with a grin. "You see? Just like the game here."

"Who's attacking us?"

"When did it begin?"

"Is someone attacking us?" asked the President.

"You launched all our missiles!"

"You sent out our planes!"

"I did? Where?"

"Everywhere! With that red button you kept pressing."

"This one? I didn't know that."

"Don't touch it again!"

"How was I supposed to know? Call them all back. Say I'm sorry. I didn't do it on purpose."

"We can't call back the missiles."

"We can call back the bombers."

"We can't call back the bombers! Suppose someone retaliates? we have to take them out first."

"I didn't know that."

"And we'll have to send out our second-strike bombers too, in case they want to hit back after our first."

"Come on, sir. We have to hurry."

"Where to?"

"Underground. To the shelters. Triage-don't you remember?"

"Sure. I was playing that one before I switched to this one."

"Damn it, sir! What the hell are you smiling about?"

"There's nothing fucking funny about this!"

"How was I supposed to know?"

"Let's move! We are the ones who have to survive."

"Can I get my wife? My children?"

"You stay here too!"

They charged out like a mob and piled into the cylindrical escape elevator awaiting them. Fat was tripped by C. Porter Lovejoy, arriving desperately to get into the elevator too, and fell down inside, with Lovejoy clinging to his back like a crazed monkey in a clawing fury.

Removing from her dark hair hot rollers of fair blue that closely matched the color of her eyes and applying lipstick and other cosmetics as though for an evening out-she had reason to wish to look her best-nurse Melissa MacIntosh made up her mind again to try to make up her own mind at lunch with John Yossarian in the disagreement over whether to keep her appointment with the obstetrician to preserve her pregnancy or the one with her gynecologist to take steps to terminate it. She had no clue of anything dire happening elsewhere.

She understood his unwillingness to marry again so soon. She helped herself to another chocolate from the one-pound box so close at hand. The candy had come as a gift from the Belgian patient and his wife the day he left the hospital, alive, after nearly two years. She was relieved the Belgians were flying back to Europe, for she had a propensity for empathetic attachments and wanted her mind free to cope with this predicament of her own.

Yossarian could give very sound reasons against fatherhood again for him now.

They made no impression. He was better and quicker in argument, and therefore, to her mind, trickier. She could admit to herself, and to her apartment mate, Angela, that she did not always think things through clearly and was not unfailingly much good at looking ahead.

However, she would not see that as a weakness.

She had something Yossarian did not: confidence, a belief that everything must turn out all right in the end for people like herself, who were good. Even Angela now, since Peter's stroke, wearying of pornography and work, putting on fat and concerned about AIDS, was talking with longing of returning to Australia, where she still had friends and family, and a favorite aunt in a nursing home, whom she hoped to start visiting. If Angela had to start thinking about condoms now, she would just as soon give up sex and get married.

Yossarian made much of that matter of years and had almost neatly tricked her again-she congratulated herself on having thwarted him-just two evenings before.

"I'm just not afraid of anything like that," she let him know defiantly, with her backbone stiffened. "We would get along without you, if we had to."

"No, no," he corrected, almost maliciously. "Suppose you are the one who dies soon!"

She refused to consider talking further about that. That picture of her infant daughter with only a father past seventy was too complex a tangle for her to seek to unravel.

She knew she was right.

She had no doubt Yossarian would be adequate with financial help, even if she persisted despite him and they no longer continued as a couple. She knew in her gut she could trust him for that much. It was true he was less frequently fervidly amorous with her than he had been in the earliest stages. He no longer teased about shopping together for lingerie, and he had not yet taken her to Paris or Florence or Munich to buy any. He sent roses now only on birthdays. But she was less amorous too, she reflected now with some contrite misgivings, and occasionally had to remind herself, cerebrally, to strive more lasciviously to achieve the feats of gratifying sensuality that had sprung more normally between them in the beginning. She acknowledged, when Angela asked, that he never seemed jealous anymore and no longer showed interest in her sexual past. He rarely even wanted to take her to the movies. He had already mentioned with no anger and small discontent that, even into the present, he had never found himself with a woman who over a continuous liaison desired to make love as often as he did. She searched back to discern if this had been true with other men who had been her friends. For that matter, he was not working as hard as before to please her either and was not much concerned when he saw he'd failed to.

She did not feel any of that mattered.

Melissa MacIntosh knew she was right and could not see that there was anything wrong in what she wanted. She was a woman who spoke of "gut feelings," as she chose to describe her dogmatic intuitions, and her gut feeling now was that if she was patient, if she simply stuck to her guns and remained tolerantly inflexible, he would, as usual, ultimately consent to whatever she wanted. On this matter of her child, he had powerful arguments. She had one weak one, and that was enough: She wanted the baby.

The thought that he might not even appear at the restaurant to argue further did not cross her mind until she was checking the small flat before leaving. She shook it right off in an impulse of terror rather than even begin to contemplate what that defection might signify.

She'd put on high heels to look all the better and walked out rapidly with footsteps clicking seductively.

Outside the apartment, near the corner toward which she proceeded for a taxicab, she saw, as expected, maintenance trucks from the Consolidated Edison Company, with men tearing downward through the asphalt making improvements or repairs. They were always there, these men from the lighting company, almost since the beginning of time, it seemed to her, as she hurried past with her high heels clicking. She was engrossed in the specifics of the looming confrontation, and she scarcely noticed that the heavens were darker than natural for that time of day.

Out of the hospital finally after so long a time, the Belgian patient was flying back to Brussels and his executive position with the European Economic Community. He talked of himself humorously as "the sick man of Europe." He was in decent health, ebullient in nature but lesser in weight, and very much a weaker man, minus one vocal cord, a lung, and one kidney. Advised to give up spirits, he had been limiting his drinking to wine and beer during the two weeks of outpatient care since his discharge.

Through the dotlike circular opening in his neck, left permanent by a plastic implant for suctioning or intubation, and through which, when he wished to clown, he was able to speak, he inhaled cigarette smoke and wheezed contentedly. He was forbidden to smoke, but concluded that way didn't count. His playful, frolicsome wife, joyous to have him back alive, smoked for him also. With practiced skill and puckered mouth, she would inhale from a cigarette of her own and, kittenish, feed, in slim direct jets, cigarette smoke into him accurately through the surgical aperture with its plastic cylinder and removable cap. Then, if at home, they would cuddle, kiss, tickle, and try to make love. To their delight and their amazement, they succeeded more regularly than either of them would have thought likely not long before. He now was normally concealing the prosthetic fixture from outsiders with a high shirt collar and large knot in his necktie or with an ascot, scarf, or colorful neckerchief. He discovered in himself a weakness for polka dots. With his wife only, this sick man of Europe shared an additional secret, his absolute belief that nothing he, his colleagues, or any organization of experts could do would have any enduring corrective effect on the economic destiny of his continent or the Western world. Humans had little command over human events. History would follow its autonomous course independent of the people who made it.

On his leaving the hospital, the two had hosted a small celebration in his room and given to each of the nurses and other staff members a bottle of champagne, a one-pound box of Fanny Farmer chocolates, and a carton of cigarettes. They would have given cash too, a one-hundred-dollar bill to each, but the hospital frowned on gifts of money.

In planes, the Belgian patient and his wife ordinarily booked first class but enjoyed spending part of the time each trip in coach seats for the closer proximity of their persons and the intimacy that permitted them to press their thighs and arms against each other with risque naughtiness while they smoked and, beneath the cover of blankets, to fondle and masturbate to climax each other's genitals.

Flying back over the Atlantic this time, they were complacently in their first-class seats watching the movie, a comedy, at that moment when the alarm they did not know about went off. Both thought hardly anything of the numerous spools of steamed white vapor they began to spot unwinding behind unseen flying bodies traveling faster than they were, higher and lower, which began to appear in the sky after the screen went black, the lights brightened back on with a ferocious glare, and the panels at the windows had been raised. Going east into nightfall, they were not disturbed to find the heavens darkening. Behind them the sun had turned as gray as lead. With the failure of the motion picture apparatus, the internal system of communications seemed affected too. There was no music or other entertainment in the headsets. When a stewardess stood up with a microphone at the front of the cabin to explain the inconveniences, her words were not transmitted. When passengers, in convivial mock annoyance, gestured to other cabin personnel to make their inquiries and the stewards and hostesses leaned downward to respond, their voices made no sound.

Dennis Teemer didn't hear it, and the cardinal, who'd previously had intimations of some designs for disaster, was not told about it. Many were called, but this man of science and this keeper of souls were not among them. Because it no longer was possible to shelter the public from attack, no public shelters were provided, and it was not thought politic to generate terror and despair with a warning that might prove unwarranted in the event the feared nuclear counterassault did not materialize.

When the alarm went off, only those happy, privileged few already chosen were summoned, rounded up, and allowed down. These were men of rare abilities deemed indispensable to the perpetuation of our way of life below earth. They were found and conducted speedily to the disguised entrances of heat-resistant elevators by special teams of dedicated MASSPOB policemen and policewomen, who had not stopped to consider, until the moment of truth arrived, that they themselves would be excluded as expendable too.

"This is Harold Strangelove, and you will be happy to hear that I and my key associates have made it down here safely and will be available to continue to provide you with our fine contacts and advice, and with our best-quality bombast too," said the voice over the public-address system, distinctly. "The President has been left behind, and I am the one who is now in charge, because I know more than everybody else. Our missiles have been launched and I guarantee we will achieve our objective successfully, once we are able to figure out what our objective in launching them was. We do not know yet if any of the territories we are attacking will retaliate. To reduce their capability, we now have all our first-strike bombers in the air. Soon we will break radio silence to let you listen. Meanwhile, I assure you that nothing has been overlooked. We have a viable community already functioning up to, or should I say down to, forty-two miles underground, and we will continue to operate smoothly and democratically as long as everyone here does exactly what I say. We are secure militarily. We have the personnel here needed to survive a nuclear counterattack outside, should any eventuate. We have political leaders, career bureaucrats, medical men, intellectuals, engineers, and other technicians. What more could we want? The entrances to all our hiding places are now sealed off by our MASSPOB special forces. Anyone fortunate enough to be here now who grows dissatisfied and wants to leave will be permitted to do so. This is a free country. But no one new will be allowed in without authorization, and none who survive will be admitted until I decide to let them in. We are well supplied with all the goods a reasonable man acting in good faith would require, and there is almost no foreseeable limit to the amount of time we can spend here comfortably as long as you all do what I say. We have recreational facilities of wide variety. We have thought of everything. Now, to fill you in, here is the new chairman of my Joint Chiefs of Staff with a report of our military situation as it exists right now."

"My fellow Americans," said General Bernard Bingam. "Frankly, I don't know any more than you do about the reasons this war had to take place, but we do know that our reasons were good ones, our cause is just, and our military operation will be as completely successful as all those we have conducted in the past. Our antimissile-missile units are all on watch and probably are achieving unbelievable success against any enemy missiles that might be raining in on us in retaliation. Our strongest hand at this stage is our heavy bombers. We have hundreds of these for our first strike, and we are going to give them the go-ahead now, purely as a precautionary measure. You will be permitted to hear me communicate now with the commander of our aeronautical operations. Here we go. Hello, hello. This is Bingam, Bingam, Bigman Bernie Bingam, calling from underground headquarters in the Ben amp; Jerry's supply depot in Washington. Come in, come in, Commander, please come in."

"Häagen-Dazs."

"Thank you, Commander Whitehead. Where are you?"

"At fifty-two thousand feet, in our floating strategic command post over the geographic center of the country."

"Perfect. Instruct your units to proceed. Time is now of the essence. Then change your location."

"We have already changed our location, even as I was reporting it."

"So it's no longer accurate?"

"It was not accurate then."

"Perfect. Report all sightings of enemy missiles or aircraft. We will fill you in when you all come back."

"Good, sir. Where should we come back to?"

"Hmmmmm. There might not be a place. I don't think we thought of that. You might as well land in the territories you've destroyed. Proceed as planned."

"Absolutely, General Bingam?"

"Positively, Commander Whitehead."

"Häagen-Dazs."

"Ben amp; Jerry's. Dr. Strangelove?"

"That was splendid."

"Absolutely, Dr. Strangelove?"

"Positively, General Bingam. We have overlooked nothing. Now I must apologize to the rest of you, for there was one little thing we did forget." He continued with an intentional slurring of words in what was obviously a self-effacing and jocund apology. "We neglected to bring down any women. Oh, yes-I can picture all of you macho men clutching your heads and moaning with pretended unhappiness. But think of the dissension they would be causing here right now. It is not for me to recommend officially, but I am reminded by our chief of medicine here that abstinence has always proved a perfect replacement for the fairer sex. Other adequate substitutes for women are masturbation, fellatio, and sodomy. We recommend condoms, and you will find huge supplies at your drugstores and supermarkets. To maintain population, we may eventually have to let some women in, if there are any left. As to clergymen, we believe we have some of all our major faiths. Until we locate them, we have a man of no faith who is ready to minister to the spiritual needs of people of all faiths. As to the outcome, I beg you not to worry. We have overlooked nothing. After our first strike, we have secret defensive-offensive planes ready for a second-strike aerial attack to destroy any weapons withstanding our first strike that might come back at us. The only thing you have to fear is fear itself. We are almost absolutely sure we may have nearly not much to worry about, thanks to our new old versions of the old new Stealth bomber, my own Strangelove B-Ware and the Minderbinder Shhhhh! There will be no newspapers. Since all reports will come from official sources, there'll be no reason to believe them, and they will be kept to a minimum. Häagen-Dazs."

"The Shhhhh!?" Yossarian was dumbfounded.

"I told you they'd work."

"Gaffney, what's going to happen?"

"I'm cut off from my sources."

Speeding downward in the elevator to the seven-mile level at a hundred miles an hour had taken close to five minutes. The rest of the way to the forty-two-mile bottom would take some twenty minutes more, and the two had agreed to continue awhile on the escalators.

"Can't you guess? Where will it all end?"

Gaffney had an answer. "Where it began, say the physicists, That's what I have in mind for the novel I might want to write. It begins after both those stories of the creation of Adam and Eve. There are two, you know."

"I know," said Yossarian.

"You would be surprised how many people don't. My story begins at the end of the sixth day of creation."

"And then where does it go?"

"Backward," crowed Gaffney, unveiling that idea for his novel as though it were already a triumph. "It goes backward, to the fifth day, like a movie running in reverse. At the beginning of mine, God turns Eve back into a rib and puts the rib back into Adam, as we find in the second version. He simply uncreates Adam and Eve from his own image, as we find in the first, as though they'd never been made. He simply disappears them, along with the cattle and other beasts and creeping things brought forth on that sixth day. On my second day, his fifth, the birds and fish are taken back. Next, the sun and moon are gone, along with the other lights in the firmament. Then the fruit trees and vegetation from the third day are taken away and the waters come back together and the dry land called earth disappears. That was the third day, and on the one after that, he takes back the firmament called heaven that was put in the midst of the waters. And then on the first day, my sixth day, the light goes too and nothing remains to separate the day from the darkness, and the earth is again without form and void. We are back to the beginning, before there was anything. Then I steal from the New Testament for a very clever touch. In the beginning was the word and the word was God, remember? Now, of course, we take away the word, and without the word, there is no God. What do you think of it?"

Yossarian said caustically: "Children will love it."

"Will it make a good movie? Because for a sequel, the whole thing starts all over again in two or three billion years and is recreated exactly the same way, to the tiniest detail."

"Gaffney, I can't wait that long. I've got a pregnant girlfriend upstairs who'll be having a baby soon if I let her. Let's walk a few miles more. I don't trust that elevator."

Looking downward as he went, Yossarian suddenly could not believe his eyes. He had misplaced his eyeglasses. But even with spectacles on, he would not have believed at first glance what he saw walking up toward him.

amp;bnsp; When he heard the alarm, General Leslie R. Groves, who had died of heart disease in 1970, decided to run for his life, downward toward the molten center of the earth, where it was hot as Hades, he knew, but not so hot as the temperature of a fusion explosion or the heat the chaplain would produce if he continued to evolve successfully into a nuclear mixture of tritium and lithium deuteride and achieved a critical mass.

"Don't hit him! Don't grab him! Don't touch him!" he barked out orders as a duty to his country and a last kindness to the chaplain, who declined to go along and save himself too. "Don't let him get overheated! He might go off!"

When they saw the general bolt, all of his scientists, technicians, engineers, and housekeeping staff went running off too, and except for the armed men at battle positions at all of the entrances, the chaplain was alone.

amp;bnsp; When the train jolted to a stop, the chaplain saw the gleaming ice skating rink in Rockefeller Center fall down out of his picture anc the skyscrapers around it begin teetering on the video screen anc come to rest with all of them erratically askew. Once before, the chaplain had sighted Yossarian crossing the street there beside a younger man who could have been his son, passing in back of a long pearl-gray limousine that seemed to be spilling tire tracks of blood from its wheels, with a sinister, angular figure with a walking stick and green rucksack eyeing both with an evil squint. He could not find Yossarian a second time either outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art each time he switched there to wait. He did not think of looking for him at the Port Authority Bus Terminal when he switched back there to gaze at those buildings wistfully. That was where he had come into the city the first time. Return trips home to Kenosha had by now grown painful. Three evenings a week he watched his wife walking slowly to meet the widow across the street to go in a car to the Presbyterian church for another session of bridge, in a group mainly of men and women who had lost their mates, watched with grief because he was no longer part of her life.

When the train stopped and the skating rink dropped, he heard ouitside a sudden racket of shouts and footsteps and guessed that something was amiss. He waited for someone to come tell him what to do. In fewer than ten minutes he was entirely on his own. General Groves was explicit.

"No, I want to go back out," he decided.

"There may be a war there."

"I want to go home."

"Albert, get mad. Don't you ever get mad?"

"I'm so mad now I can explode."

"That's a good one too! And I'll do what I can to clear the way." And that's when the chaplain heard him shouting his las commands before dashing away.

Cautiously, tentatively, the chaplain stepped down from the train. He had on his person some cash from the general, and his Social Security number had been returned to him too. He was last off the train. A distance away he saw a bank of escalators that looked brand-new. He was completely alone but for the guards in red field jackets, green trousers, and brown combat boots. These were stationed with weapons at all the entrances and at the top and the bottom of the down escalator. He was free to go up, free to leave.

"You might have trouble coming back in, sir."

As soon as he stepped aboard the escalator, he began to walk, anxious to get where he was going as quickly as he could. As he climbed, he increased his pace. When he reached the top, he followed the arrow to a cylindrical elevator with transparent panels that, after he pressed the topmost button, began rising with a speed that robbed him of breath initially and made his viscera sink. Through vertical transparent panels he saw himself passing through a golf course and then an amusement park with a roller-coaster and Ferris wheel, with attendants in jackets the same shade of red as the special troops of soldiers. He passed roadways with military vehicles and sedans with civilians. He passed a railway with mobile missiles and another with refrigerated supply cars marked WISCONSIN CHEESE and BEN amp; JERRY'S ICE CREAM. Where the elevator stopped, after a ride of nearly twenty minutes, he found another pair of brand-new escalators. Where these ended he boarded another elevator and again pressed the highest button. Then he was ascending on an escalator again. He felt he had been trudging upward for miles. He did not tire. Gazing ahead upward all the time, he suddenly, in jarring disbelief, came face-to-face with Yossarian, who was walking down toward him rapidly on the other escalator, and they gaped at each other in mutual recognition.

"What are you doing here?" they both exclaimed.

"Me? What are you doing here?" they both retorted.

They rode away in opposite directions.

"Chaplain, don't go out!" Yossarian shouted back up at him through cupped hands. "There's danger outside. A war. Come back down!"

"Fuck you!" cried the chaplain, and wondered where in the world such words had come from.

Having passed his lips, they spurred him on with a spirit of liberation he himself thought fanatic. Eventually, he stormed from the last of the elevators and found himself facing a thoroughfare cluttered with transport and rushing pedestrians, with a steep staircase of wrought iron across the way that rose in short flights to spiraling landings and had a platform at the top at an exit with a large metal door. Mounting these, he paid no attention to an outburst of barking wild dogs he heard behind him. At the top was a guard. On the door were the words: EMERGENCY ENTRANCE NO ADMITTANCE THIS DOOR MUST BE LOCKED AND BOLTED WHEN IN USE The guard made no move to stop him. Instead, obligingly, he turned the lock, shifted the bolt, and slid open the door. Two more guards were on duty at the other side. These did not interfere with him either. He found himself walking through a metal closet into a small service room of some kind and then outside into a corridor underneath a staircase slanting upward over his head and then, out in front of him, he saw an exit door leading to the street. His heart leaped. He was beginning to see the light, he told himself, and pushed outside into a dark day, passing a smal mound of shit in a corner, at which he glanced but briefly.

He was at the bus terminal, in a side street on a lower level from which buses set out. One, with engine warming, was about to leave for Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was one of three passengers Once relaxed in his seat, he blew his nose, coughed to clear his throat, sighed heavily in relief. Each time they stopped for food he would try a phone call until he reached her. The boarding platform was beneath a sheltering overhang, and he was not surprisec to see the light so dull. But when they were through the tunnel and out on the highway, the sky was no brighter. With hardly any curiosity, he looked upward out his window and saw that the sun itself was an ashy gray and darkened around its rim in a circle oi black. In Wisconsin on drab days he had seen such feeble suns often behind masses of clouds. He didn't see that there were no clouds. nbsp; In the editorial meeting at the New York Times conducted daily to determine the makeup of the front page of the ensuing edition, they decided to predict, and the television newscasters would therefore decide to report, an unpredictable solar eclipse.

Frances Beach, devoting herself with priority to the care and comfort of an invalid husband, had long since passed the point where she cared what the New York Times or any other newspaper decided about anything but fashion. In her final years, she was not surprised to find herself deeply in love with Yossarian again. What had been lacking in their affection, she concluded benevolently with a remorseful smile, looking up from her book and lifting her reading glasses, was strife and drama. Neither had ever had real need for the other. What was wrong between them was that nothing between them had ever gone wrong.

Claire Rabinowitz felt herself in pugnacious opposition to all her fellow passengers on the El Al flight transporting her to Israel to see for herself the seaside summer house outside Tel Aviv on which she had made a down payment in the form of an option to buy. There had been not much eye contact with anyone in the first-class lounge or in the waiting area at the gate, to which, out of aggressive curiosity, she had also wandered to kill time. There was not a man aboard of any age, traveling with family or without, who came even close to what she considered with pride her standards. There wasn't one who could hold a candle to her Lew. Sammy Singer, in California or on his way to Hawaii or Australia, had predicted that might happen, and she had taken his warning as a compliment. When she spoke of Lew to anyone, to her children or Sammy, she never spoke of him as hers. When she thought of him, he was still her Lew. She was conquering slowly her reluctance to concede that it would forever be impossible for her to recreate what had been. She took for granted that all of the others on the flight were Jewish too, even those, like herself, who looked American and agnostic.

Crossing the Mediterranean while the day was breaking, there was no signal of any new disaster portending. There was a sketchy news report that an oil tanker had collided with a cruise ship somewhere below. Her mood was surly, and she did not care that her expression might show it. Another dimension to her latent disappointments was that she did not feel yet as she had hoped she might, that in going to Israel, she was going home.

Shortly after the alarm went off, Mr. George C. Tilyou felt his world shudder. In his Steeplechase Park, he saw the power fail on his El Dorado carousel and the elegant rotating platforms coast to a standstill with the emperor on board. He saw, strangely, that his two World War II airplane pilots were gone, as though called away. His Coney Island acquaintance Mr. Rabinowitz was staring at the mechanism from a distance, as though analyzing a malfunction he might have it in his means to correct. Frowning, Mr Tilyou walked back into his office. He dusted his derby with his sleeve while restoring it to its peg on the coatrack. He felt his anger melt away. His depression returned.

His appointment with the higher authorities, with Lucifer and perhaps Satan himself, to demand an explanation for the peculiar behavior of his house, would be postponed again. There was no longer doubt it was sinking gradually, without his blessing and beyond his control. Careful measurements betrayed subversive disappearance. As he glanced at it now from his rolltop desk it went down suddenly before his eyes. Almost before he could understand what was happening, the entire bottom floor was gone. His house of three stories was now one of two stories. From overhead, while he was still staring, widening showers of dirt came spilling down, and then great rough clumps of earth, stones, and other debris began to fall in too. Something new he had no planned on was coming through from outside with a crunching roar. He saw torn electrical connections dangling. He saw duct of bolted sheet metal. He saw tubes. He recognized a bulky under side with a dense configuration of ponderous dripping refrigeration pipes encased in a crystalline jacket of melting frost.

His mood of depression lifted.

He saw in a red jacket a Japanese man with ice skates holding onto a corner of the floor for dear life.

It was the skating rink from Rockefeller Center!

He had to smile. He saw Mr. Rockefeller turn pale, quiver, and flee in panic. Mr. Morgan slumped naked to the ground with bowed head, weeping, and began to pray. The emperor had no clothes either.

Mr. Tilyou had to laugh. There was nothing new under the sun. He was seeing something new, learning a lesson he had never dreamed possible. Even hell was not forever.

Yossarian could not believe his ears. Where in the world had the chaplain learned to say "Fuck you!" so well? By the time Yossarian reached bottom, the chaplain was over the top and gone from view. Gaffney had started to tell him they had better return to the elevators to get down to McBride and the others when the Strangelove voice returned to announce that they had nothing to fear but a shortage of tailors.

"That is something else we forgot, and some of us at headquarters look sloppy. We have irons but nobody who knows how to use them. We have cloth and thread and sewing machines. But we need someone who sews. Does anyone hear me? Come in if you sew."

"Häagen-Dazs. I can do laundry and iron. My weapons officer is the son of a tailor."

"Turn back immediately and join us here."

"Right, sir. How can we get there?"

"We forgot that too!"

"Gaffney," said Yossarian, when they had ten miles more to go. "How long will we be here?"

"My future may lie here," replied Gaffney. "When we're down and have time, there's something I want to show you. It's on an acre and a half on a lake under Vermont, near an underground golf course and good skiing in Ben amp; Jerry territory, in case you're planning to buy."

"Now? You think I'm planning to buy now?"

"One must always look ahead, says the good Senor Gaffney. It's waterfront property, Yo-Yo. You can triple your money in a couple of months. You have to see it."

"I won't have time. I have an appointment for lunch."

"Your appointment might be canceled."

"I might want to keep it."

"All plans are off if it's really a war."

"The wedding too?"

"With bombs coming in? We don't really need the wedding anymore, now that we have it on tape."

"Are there bombs coming in?"

Gaffney shrugged. McBride didn't know either, they found out, when they rode the long escalator down to the bottom from the final stop on the elevator. Neither did the disparate pair of intelligence agents, who had no idea what to do with themselves next.

Strangelove had an answer when he came back on. "No, no bombs are sighted yet coming this way. This has us confused. But those of us here have nothing to fear. Only one air force in the world has bombs that can penetrate this deeply before exploding, and they all belong to us. We have overlooked nothing, except some barbers. While we wait to see if anyone strikes back, we need some barbers, even one. Any barber who hears this, respond at once. We have overlooked nothing. All our facilities will be operational in two or three weeks if you abide by my rules. If any of you anticipate trouble following my instructions, please follow this instruction and leave today. General Bingam will now send all our B-Wares and Shhhhh! s out on a second-strike attack, after we confirm there are no tailors or barbers on board."

Raul scowled and said, "Merde." Gangly, orange-haired, freckle-faced Bob looked much less happy than usual. Both had families they worried about.

McBride worried too. "If there's a war outside, I'm not sure I want to be down here."

Michael did want to be, with Marlene agreeing, and Yossarian did not blame him.

There was need, said Strangelove, for a shoemaker.

"Merde," said Raul. "That man is so full of merde."

"Yes, we have overlooked nothing, but we forgot that too," Dr. Strangelove continued, with an affected snigger. "We have warehouses full of these lovely new state-of-the-art shoes, buf sooner or later they are going to need shines and repairs. Apart from that too, we have overlooked nothing. We can live here forever, if you do what I tell you."

They were near the platform of a train station overlooking narrow-gauge railroad tracks of a type Yossarian felt certain he had seen before. The reduced span of the tunnels ensured a train of small size, something on the scale of a miniature amusement ride.

"Here comes another one," called out McBride. "Let's sec what's there this time."

He moved closer to observe more quickly as a bright-red small locomotive pulled into sight at moderate speed with a signal bell clanging. It was running on electricity but flaunted a scarlet smokestack with designs in polished brass. Working the clapper of the bell with a piece of clothesline fixed to his control levers was a grinning engineer of middle age, uniformed in a red jacket with a circular MASSPOB shoulder patch. The little train went rolling on by, bringing smoothly in tow some open-topped, narrow passenger cars with people on board sitting two abreast! Again Yossarian could not believe his eyes. McBride pointed in frantic excitement at the two figures sitting in the first seat of the first car.

"Hey, I know those people! Who are they again?"

"Fiorello H. La Guardia and Franklin Delano Roosevelt," Yossarian answered, and said absolutely nothing about the two elderly couples who sat with his older brother in the seats in back of them.

In the next carriage he recognized John F. Kennedy with his wife alongside, behind the former governor of Texas and his wife who had been in the death car with him.

And by himself on a seat in the car that followed those immortals rode Noodles Cook, looking haggard, disoriented, and half dead in front of two government officials Yossarian remembered from news reports. One was fat and one was skinny, and seated side by side behind them in the last seat of this third of three cars were C. Porter Lovejoy and Milo Minderbinder. Lovejoy was talking, counting on his fingers. Both were alive, and Milo was smiling too.

"I could have sworn," said Yossarian, "that Milo had been left behind."

Gaffney formed with his mouth the one word "Never."

It was then that Yossarian decided to keep his date with Melissa. He did not want to remain down there with Strangelove and those others. Gaffney was shocked and thought he was mad. It was not in the cards.

"Oh, no, no, Yo-Yo." Gaffney was shaking his head. "You can't go out. It makes no sense now. You won't go."

"Gaffney, I am going. You're wrong again."

"But you won't get far. You won't last long."

"We'll see. I'll try."

"You'll have to be careful. There's danger outside."

"There's danger in here. Anyone coming?"

McBride, as though waiting, jumped forward and joined him. "You'd never find your way out without me." At Yossarian's side, he confessed, "I'm worried about Joan out there alone."

Gaffney would wait until he knew much more. "I know enough now not to take chances."

Michael too did not like taking chances, and Yossarian did not blame him for that one either.

Bob and Raul had too much intelligence to put themselves at risk when they did not have to, and could worry about their families just as well from down there.

As he saw Yossarian riding up away from him on the escalato to the elevator to keep a lunch date with his pregnant girlfriend, Michael, who'd been both proud and embarrassed by his father's love affair, had the listless, desolate feeling that one of them was dying, maybe both.

Yossarian, striding anxiously up the escalator to hurry back outside as fast as he could get there, was stimulated joyously by a resurrection of optimism more native to Melissa than himself the innate-and inane-conviction that nothing harmful could happen to him, that nothing bad could happen to a just man. This was nonsense, he knew; but he also knew, in his gut, he'd be as safe as she was, and had no doubt then that all three of them, he, Melissa, and the new baby, would survive, flourish, and live happily-forever after.

"Häagen-Dazs."

"What was that about?" the aviator Kid Sampson asked, from the back compartment of the invisible and noiseless sub-super sonic attack bomber.

"Was your father a shoemaker?" answered the pilot McWatt "Are you the son of a barber?"

"I can't sew either."

"Then we have to go on. It's another mission for us."

"Where to?"

"I've forgotten. But inertia will guide us. Our inertial guidance system will always take us."

"McWatt?"

"Sampson?"

"How long have we been together now? Two years, three?"

"It feels more like fifty. Sampson, you know what I regret? That we never talked more to each other."

"We never got more to talk about, did we?"

"What's that down there? A missile?"

"Let me see on my radar." Crossing below them on a course almost perpendicular were four parallel contrails gliding out from jet engines as though extruded in chalk. "It's an airliner, McWatt. A, passenger plane on the way to Australia."

"I wonder how those passengers would feel if they knew we were up here on this mission again amp; ghost riders in the sky."

"McWatt?"

"Sampson?"

"Do we really have to go in again?"

"I guess we have to, don't we?"

"Do we?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah. I think we have to."

"Oh, well. What the hell."

Sam Singer had no illusions. Unlike Yossarian, he had no hopes of finding romance and falling in love again with somebody new. Succumbing unresistingly to the harsh necessity of living alone, to which he had been presented with no agreeable alternative, he had not been shattered by the merciless deprivations. He had discussed this; future with Glenda, who, despite her terminal condition, worried more about his solitary years ahead than he had been able to do.

He saw friends, read more, watched television news. He had New York. He went to plays and movies, occasionally to opera, used to always have engaging classical music on one of the FM radio stations, played bridge one or two evenings most weeks in neighborly communal groups of people largely like himself who weite mostly even-tempered and congenial. Each time he listened to Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony he was filled with awe and amazed. He had his volunteer work with the cancer relief agency. He had his few female friends. He drank no more than before. He learned quickly to eat by himself, carry-out dishes at home, lunches and dinners in neighborhood coffee shops and small restaurants, meals that were not feasts, reading too at a table alone, his book or magazine or his second newspaper of the day. Occasionally, he played pinochle with others left over from Coney Island. He still was not good. He went out evenings about as often as he wished to.

He was greatly pleased so far on his trip around the world, greatly surprised by his feeling of well-being and his large amounts of satisfaction. It was good again to be out of his apartment. In Atlanta and Houston with his daughters and their husbands and children he had at last reached a stage at which he found himself sated with their company before any of them showed signs of growing restless with his. He must be feeling his age, he offered in apology early each evening, before departing for the night. He insisted always on staying in nearby hotels. In Los Angeles he was still in lifelong harmony with Winkler and his wife. They all three tired in perfect coordination. He had a few good dates with his nephew and his family and was genuinely charmed by the precocious brightness and beauty of the children. But between himself and all the young adults with whom he found himself, he had to concede that more than a generation gap divided them.

Once outside New York, he was thankful he had taken his cassette player and tapes and some books of solid content that demanded studious involvement.

In Hawaii he sunned himself in daytime and finished rereading Middlemarch. Knowing better what to expect, he was able to appreciate it richly. In his two evenings there he had dinner with the former wife of his old friend and her present husband, and with the woman, now single, he'd worked with at Time magazine, with whom Glenda had been acquainted too. Had she invited him home to spend the night with her, he would have certainly consented. But she did not seem to know that. Lew or Yossarian would have managed it better.

He looked forward keenly to the two weeks in Australia with old good friends, also from his days back at Time. He had no hesitation about staying in their house in Sydney. He and Glenda had been there together one time before. The man walked with metal canes. A long time had passed since they'd last come to New York. In the narrow pool outdoors, on the harbor side of the house, he would swim thirty or sixty laps before breakfast-Sam was not sure he remembered which-and another thirty or sixty soon after, keeping his torso hefty enough to continue moving about on the canes and in the car with hand controls he'd been using since the illness that had rendered him paraplegic forty years back. From the hips up he probably would still have the brawny body of a weight lifter. They had five grown children. Sam was eager to see them again too. One was in agriculture in Tasmania, and they planned to fly there for two days. Another ranched, a third did work in genetics in a laboratory in the university in Canberra. All five were married. None had been divorced.

Sam left Hawaii on an Australian airliner in dead of night and was scheduled to arrive in Sydney after breakfast the next morning. He read, he drank, he ate, he slept and wakened. Daybreak came stealing in with a dingy dawn, and the sun seemed slow in rising. Clouds lay unbroken below. What light appeared remained sunken on a low horizon and continued dim. To one side of him the sky was navy blue, with a full yellow moon hanging low and distant like a hostile clock; on the other, the sky looked gray and black, almost the color of charcoal. High above, he saw snowy contrails cross the path of his own plane, in a ghostly formation traveling eastward at a speed more swift, and assumed they came from a military group on morning maneuvers. There was some consternation in the cabin crew when the radio system first went silent. But the other navigational systems remained operational, and there was no cause for alarm. Earlier there was a vague news report of an oil tanker colliding with a cargo ship somewhere below.

Sam Singer soon had going on his cassette player a tape of the Fifth Symphony of Gustav Mahler. Listening again, he discovered more new things he treasured. The remarkable symphony was infinite in its secrets and multiple satisfactions, ineffable in loveliness, sublime, and hauntingly mysterious in the secrets of its powers and genius to so touch the human soul. He could hardly wait for the closing notes of the finale to speed jubilantly to their triumphant end, in order to start right back at the beginning and revel again in all of the engrossing movements in which he was basking now. Although he knew it was coming and always prepared himself, he was expectantly bewitched each time by the mournful sweet melody filtering so gently into the foreboding horns opening the first movement, so sweetly mournful and Jewish. The small adagio movement later was as beautiful as beautiful melodic music ever could be. Mostly of late in music he preferred the melancholy to the heroic. His biggest fear now in the apartment in which he dwelt alone was a horror of decomposing there. The book he was holding in his lap when he settled back to read while listening was a paperback edition of eight stories by Thomas Mann. The yellow moon turned orange and soon was as red as a setting sun.